Emily Feng
Emily Feng is NPR's Beijing correspondent.
Feng joined NPR in 2019. She roves around China, through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. Feng contributes to NPR's newsmagazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.
Previously, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. Based in Beijing, she covered a broad range of topics, including human rights and technology. She also began extensively reporting on the region of Xinjiang during this period, becoming the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uyghur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and discovering that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang's detention camps.
Feng's reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine; the top of a mosque in Qinghai; and from inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in.
Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018, recognized by the Amnesty Media Awards in February 2019 and won a Human Rights Press merit that May. Her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China earned her another Human Rights Press Award, was recognized by the National Headliners Award, and won a Gracie Award. She was also named a Livingston Award finalist in 2021.
Feng graduated cum laude from Duke University with a dual B.A. degree from Duke's Sanford School in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and in public policy.
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Both the U.S. and China stepped up military activity in the region ahead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit. Here's what is different now from crises in the Taiwan Strait decades ago. -
Ukraine lost territory to Russia in the southern Kherson region early in the war. Residents fleeing rural villages there describe their desperation under Russian military control.
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More than four dozen Russian missiles hit cities across Ukraine over the weekend as G7 leaders met in Germany to discuss Russia's war on Ukraine and other topics.
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Russian missiles hit cities in western Ukraine throughout the weekend, an escalation that has punctured the relative lull in fighting in and around Kyiv.
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New U.S. legislation will force companies to prove that goods imported from the Chinese region Xinjiang are not made with forced labor. Experts say proving this is nearly impossible.
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A gunman who killed one man and shot others exposes the complex identities of Taiwanese and Chinese people.
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A deadly shooting at a Taiwanese church in California exposes rising tensions between Taiwan and China.
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Crushed by COVID-19 lockdowns and hemmed in by stricter political controls, more Chinese citizens are exploring options to leave China altogether.
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China's "zero COVID" approach requires hundreds of thousands of temporary workers. They are poorly paid and poorly treated. Where are the new COVID control workers coming from?
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Angry, depressed, or flat out bored by successive COVID lockdowns, Chinese writers are adapting Western literature classics to amuse themselves.
